Quick Tip: Make a Simple Noise Gate in Reason 5

Reason 6 has a section in the new mixer dedicated to the reduction of background noise, and all you have to do to achieve it is twist a button. I was wondering if this process can be done in earlier versions using other techniques. Today I'll show you a simple way to make a threshold gate in Reason 5 using the RV7000 Advanced Reverb.

Tip: This technique can be used in any version of Reason that has RV7000 device.

Step 1

Create a Combinator by right clicking, and from the list choose "Combinator".

First we need to input the sample that we will be cleaning up. To do that, inside the Combinator, right click and choose NN-XT Advanced Sampler from the "Create" menu.

Step 2

Open the remote editor of the NN-XT device by clicking the left bottom arrow, and choose your sample. I chose a vocal sample, which has been added some noise in the background.

Step 3

OK, now right click on NN-XT Advanced Sampler and create an instance of RV7000 Advanced Reverb. The first thing we want to do is to enable the gate. Then set the "Dry/Wet" rotary to maximum.

If you play the sample right now, will notice that it is not really what we want to achieve, but we are close.

Now, here's the trick. Open the remote programmer of RV7000, and the reverb algorithm will be "Hall". This is not what we want. Change the reverb algorithm to the last one called "Reverse".

What is so special about the "Reverse" mode, is that it has its own "Dry/Wet", and that means we can bypass what the reverb does and use the other functions of RV7000.

Step 4

Now set the "Rev Dry/Wet" to zero, and the length to 10 milliseconds. Select the "Gate" option, so we can edit the gate parameters.

I set the threshold rotary to -16.1 dB for my audio, but in general adjusting this knob depends on the audio sample.